Student Becomes First to Have Paper Published in The Royal Society Journal

As of December 4, 2008, Brian Maicke will be the first University of Tennessee Space Institute graduate student to have a paper published in the Royal Society Journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Brian, along with Dr. Joe Majdalani, wrote A Constant Shear Stress Core Flow Model of the Bidirectional Vortex.

The paper was a spinoff for Maicke out of his Masters Degree in Aerospace, where he discusses the modeling of swirling motions (such as tornados), constructs a mathematical model, and describes the important physical characteristics of these flow fields. Such characteristics are now being used to improve the efficiency and performance of vortex-fired liquid and hybrid rocket engines. Before submission to the Royal Society, Maicke and Majdalani first presented the work as a conference paper in June 2007 at the 37th AIAA Fluid Dynamics Conference in Miami, FL.

Proceedings A has a well-known history of publishing pioneering and influential research articles across the entire range of the physical and mathematical sciences. Dating back to the days of Newton, the transactions of the Royal Society are considered the world’s oldest repository of scientific articles. Maicke and Majdalani are proud to share the journal’s pages with illustrious names in science. Readers may recognize some of their scientific heroes in Newton, Braggs, Dirac, Gauss, Heaviside, Heisenberg, Jeffreys, Lord Kelvin, Lighthill, Maxwell, Pauli, Poincare, Lord Rayleigh, Raman, Reynolds, Schrödinger, Stokes, Taylor, and Young. The Royal Society journal publishes research papers, as well as short reviews containing original and interesting new ideas.

The paper is due to be published online on Thursday, December 4, 2008. This will be the second journal article originating from Maicke’s M.S. work, with the first one being On the Rotational Compressible Taylor Flow in Injection-Driven Porous Chambers, which appeared earlier this year in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. The UTSI team would like to extend special thanks to Dr. Martin Chiaverini, Head of Propulsion at Orbital Technologies Corporation, and to Dr. Mark Anderson of The University of Wisconsin, both of whom helped in providing the experimental data that was used in the analysis.